The sound came again, closer this time. Footsteps, barely out of sync with her own. But unmistakably the sound of boots hitting earth.

  Dyathne froze.

  The steps stopped. The fog ahead undulated briefly, almost imperceptibly. For half a breath, she thought it could be the Rite firing prematurely: a phantom born of pain and fatigue. Hallucinations weren’t unheard of in the Sear. She grasped the compass, clutching it to her chest until its soft whirr helped steady her breathing.

  Maybe she hadn’t heard anything. Maybe it was a memory of their last crossing.

  Just as her breaths regulated and her steps resumed, a dark shape materialized in the fog.

  Not a shape,

  Whoever it was moved the way she did when she walked the Sear: slow, deliberate heel to toe steps. Head turning rhythmically, listening. Breath controlled behind a vizard.

  An Ashwalker.

  The realization hit harder than the fall had. Instinctively, her hand went to the line at her waist, then stilled. It was coiled neatly, unconnected to her partner. There were no pairs here; her Nother was gone. And there was no explanation for one of her kind to be standing in the fog ahead.

  The figure stopped too.

  They stood facing one another, fog coiling between them, two silhouettes set in opposition.

  The other Ashwalker lifted a hand. Not in greeting, but in the old signal for .

  Dyathne’s breath caught.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Officially, signals had been struck from the training manuals centuries ago. When there were no other Ashwalkers beyond the active pair, the complex signals had become anachronisms.

  Iphan had insisted she learn them regardless.

  At the time, she thought it a foolish waste; time better spent memorizing the maps of the known portions of the Sear.

  Now, she wished the old man was beside her to help her remember.

  The figure, right arm bent upward ninety degrees at the elbow, hand in a fist, moved again. The Ashwalker slowly straightened their arm, stretching out from the shoulder, and opened its palm.

  Greeting? Dyathne thought. Or was that the signal for water? Water was right. Or was it left? She cursed Iphan for dying and leaving her with half-remembered signals in the fog.

  She didn’t move. She barely breathed. She just stared.

  Do something.

  “Hello,” she finally croaked after several tense minutes. The sound of her own voice seemed deafening, even though it barely made it through her mask.

  Ashwalkers didn't talk during the Rite, even to their Nother. They barely talked outside of it, either. To break the muffled still of the fog felt blasphemous.

  The figure froze for a moment, then dropped their arm as if in resignation.

  “I won’t hurt you,” came a voice at last, distinctly male.

  Dyathne frowned. It wasn’t a greeting, it was mutual assessment.

  “Nor I,” she replied, trying to control the tremor in her voice.

  The man stepped closer, his figure still distorted by the fog. All she could make out was that he was tall and trim, far taller than the men she knew back home. She instinctively shifted her weight to her back foot, preparing to run.

  “My compass,” he reached into his coat.

  Dyathne tensed, but he proffered the familiar metal tool, open palmed, raising it slowly toward her as if approaching a feral animal.

  “It stopped working. Weeks ago.”

  Weeks? Dyathne shivered at the thought of wandering the Sear for weeks.

  “Where is your Nother?” Dyathne squinted at him, taking half a step back.

  “My what?” He asked, stopping.

  “Your Nother,” she repeated slowly, wondering if her vizard had muffled her words. When he stayed silent, she continued. “The other Ashwalker. Your partner. Where are they?”

  The Sear could induce madness, Dyathne had felt it creeping up her hairline on more than one crossing, when the Rite ran long, when the silence threatened to consume them. When the void started to press in.

  An Ashwalker without a Nother didn’t last weeks.

  “There’s no one else.”